Hugo Learns Fast…

From the Wall Street Journal: “Venezuela Warns on Toyota Plant
“Venezuela’s president has threatened to expropriate Toyota’s local assembly plant if it doesn’t produce more vehicles designed for rural areas and increase technology transfer.”
President Obama needs to send an envoy to teach Hugo how to do these things with greater subtlety!

Reform The Public Pension Program?

 

All negotiations regarding pay and pension for public employees to be done in PUBLIC. (It’s OUR Money!)

 

Pensions to be figured ONLY on “base pay” — ignoring “spiking” final pensions by including overtime, and extra pay and benefits.

 

All disabilities to be figured and determined after retirement, stopping “Chief’s illness” where police and firepeople get disability in [...]

The Cops ARE The Robbers!

 
Four retiring Parsippany cops share $900K in sick, vacation pay
By Eugene Paik/For The Star-Ledger
December 23, 2009, 5:31AM
PARSIPPANY — Four township police officers, each with more than 24 years of experience, will retire by the end of the month.
They’ll also receive nearly $900,000 during the next several years for unspent time off.
Like other retired Parsippany officers [...]

“Putting Their Lives on the Line”

The unions will tell you that “they put their lives on the line for you” – and it is true, but they do not rank in the top ten of “Dangerous Jobs” as published in many places and as determined from statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The following 10 occupations had the highest fatality [...]

Copenhagen Is a Leftist Plot to Steal

Copenhagen has little to do with Global Whatever, it is just another excuse for poor countries to us AGW (read “White Guilt” for being economically successful) to demand a transfer of wealth from rich countries to poor countries.
At the conference, Venezuela’s Chavez got a rousing ovation with this line “our revolution seeks to help all [...]

The Copenhagen Snowstorm

I would hope that even liberals would oppose what is apparently going on in Copenhagen.
(I say “apparently” because it is like the Senate Healthcare Bill – no one knows what is being discussed!)
I assume that the United States will “promise” about $30 billion a year to match the European nations, and of course the “developing [...]

Chapter Four of CRU E-Mail Kerfuffle

In this chapter, I investigate the culture in which scientists fudge data, threaten others who hold competing theories with bodily harm or blackballing from publishing.
It should be noted that scientists are human, with the same human foibles as most of the rest of us, but they deal in a subject so distant from most that [...]

Here It Comes Again!

Today’s Op-Ed column in the NC Times alerts some to the fact that Rep. Gutierrez (D-Il) is pushing an amnesty bill for illegal aliens. That bill has the support of the Latino Caucus, and the Black Caucus – but more importantly it has the support of the SEIU – one of the most politically powerful [...]

The Servants Become the Masters

My post on the obscene pay of the Vallejo firemen is proof that it is not JUST the obscene benefits that unions cause — it is the pay as well.
Of course that pay then transfers to obscene retirement.
But it is more than JUST pay and benefits as determined by retirement pay AND medical for life [...]

Columbia — Iraq — Afghanistan?

The continuing question about the Afghanistan policy is interesting. (See the Steve Chapman Op-Ed on the Editorial page.)
It is certainly chancy but it is based on the successful Clinton administration policy in Columbia, which then worked in Iraq. Columbia, the size of Spain, France and Portugal together, was half under the control of a Communist [...]